For recording or replaying in real-time digital high bandwidth video signals, e.g. HDTV, HD progressive or HD film capture signals, very fast memories are required. For storage of streaming HD video data NAND FLASH memory based systems could be used. Flash memory devices are physically accessed in a page oriented mode, whereby one ‘page’ includes e.g. 1024 data words and related error correction code (ecc). Erase operations on a specific flash memory can be carried out on certain-size data blocks only. These data blocks are denoted by the term ‘flash block’ in the following. A flash block consists of e.g. 64 pages. NAND flash memories have two basic disadvantages:                the write access is rather slow;        they have unmasked production defects and acquire even more defects during their lifetime. The required error handling is under user responsibility. This is also true for equivalent memory types.        
Since a detection of defects in flash memory devices (e.g. NAND devices) takes place for instance during an erase operation, a defect in a page makes an entire flash block unusable. Such defect flash blocks must not be used by the file system. The handling of such defects is fully under user responsibility.
It is known to use redundancy codes like Reed-Solomon for such error processing, but that has other disadvantages like high dynamic time consumption versus real-time behaviour. For example, the following NAND flash memories are on the market: Samsung K9K2G16U0M-YCB000 (2 Gbit, 16 bit oriented), K9W4G08U0M-YCB000 (4 Gbit, 8 bit oriented), Toshiba TH58NVG2S3BFT00 (4 Gbit, 8 bit oriented), MICRON MT29G08AAxxx (2 Gbit, 8 bit oriented), MT29G16AAxxx (2 Gbit, 16 bit oriented), Samsung K9K4G08 (4 Gbit, 8 bit oriented).